The winner of the 2012 caucuses, we now know, was Rick Santorum. The loser, it’s becoming clear, was Iowa.

The certified results released this week from the nation’s first presidential nominating contest revealed that Mitt Romney’s declared eight-vote victory on caucus night was actually a 34-vote defeat. They revealed that eight voting precincts went missing in action, and their votes will never be counted. And they were accompanied by evolving statements from the Republican Party of Iowa, which, having initially called the race for Romney, first declared this week’s result a “split decision” and only later acknowledged victory for Santorum.

Such a muddled result and response threatens the already-contested legitimacy of Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status and underscores the need for reforms to professionalize the voting process, political observers and party officials said.

“It’s bad. It really hurts the caucuses,” longtime Iowa observer David Yepsen said. “The caucuses have lots of critics, and for this to happen really jeopardizes the future of the event.”

Criticism of Iowa’s place on the nominating calendar has long come from other states envious of the attention it receives, and has often focused on the demographic realities that make it unrepresentative of the country as a whole.

But this year’s fumbled result opens a new line of attack: that Iowa’s process is amateurish, and that its results cannot be trusted.

“Iowa was just indicted for not being able to add. We look silly,” said Yepsen, the director of the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale and a former Des Moines Register columnist.

The Republican Party of Iowa issued this statement Friday night: “In order to clarify conflicting reports and to affirm the results released January 18 by the Republican Party of Iowa, Chairman Matthew Strawn and the State Central Committee declared Senator Rick Santorum the winner of the 2012 Iowa Caucus.”

Larry J. Sabato, a respected elections forecaster and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, called the caucuses’ shifting results an “embarrassment.” His Twitter feed, he said, has been a running stream of anti-Iowa invective in recent days.

“People in a lot of other states are tired of Iowa going first, there’s no question about it,” he said. “And Iowa played right into the hands of its critics.”

A big question, though, is whether such frustration will actually drive a challenge to Iowa’s pre-eminence in presidential cycles to come.

In Yepsen’s view, this month’s “failure” (his word) certainly could prompt future candidates to shy away from Iowa and lead the media to discount its results.

Others weren’t so sure, though.

Drake University political scientist Dennis Goldford pointed to two factors in Iowa’s favor: Its botched results didn’t change the race in a meaningful way, and a debate over which state should succeed Iowa is almost surely more trouble than it’s worth.

“It’s easy to pile on Iowa and the system we have, but as much as you dislike it, it’s probably less unpleasant than what you get into with proposals to change it,” Goldford said.

It’s especially unclear how this month’s confusion will influence states that in the past have attempted to leapfrog Iowa for its first-in-the-nation status or the Republican National Committee, which polices the nominating process.

Officials in Florida, for example, have long claimed that its large and diverse population is a more representative sample of the U.S. electorate, and thus more worthy of an early date on the nominating calendar. It attempted to force the issue this year when it moved its primary to Jan. 31, prompting Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina to move their contests even earlier.

Republican Party of Florida spokesman Brian Hughes said Friday it was “way too early to think about what might happen four or eight years down the road,” but couldn’t resist taking a shot at Iowa’s first-in-the-nation claim.

“122,000 votes are cast, and it takes you two weeks to figure out who won?” Hughes said. “It does beg a question if that process makes a lot of sense.”

Florida, he noted, has already received more than 122,000 absentee ballots for its Republican primary, and expects total turnout to approach 2 million.

The Republican National Committee in the past has written a special rule allowing Iowa to schedule its caucuses ahead of most other states without penalty, but officials on Friday said it was far too early to predict how this year’s results would affect a similar rule in the future.

“All in all, we’re happy with the outcome from the caucuses,” RNC spokesman Ryan Mahoney said. “We had record turnout and a lot of enthusiasm from a state that’s going to be crucial in 2012.”

Several observers agreed, however, that changes will be critical if the Iowa caucuses are to remain relevant.

The 2012 contest, those observers said, revealed that while the caucuses have become a national focal point in the presidential election, their processes haven’t changed much since they were sleepy delegate-selection meetings.

“The problem is you have a counting system that’s based upon a caucus that occurred in 1976 when everybody went over to Martha’s house, sat around a potbelly stove, and she wrote down the numbers on a slip of paper and called them in,” Yepsen said.

Such an insular, volunteer-based, party-run system just doesn’t hold up under modern demands for accuracy and timeliness.

“The difficulty is that the caucuses have come to have a political weight on them that they really weren’t designed to have,” Goldford said.

Many options exist for buttressing the caucuses to withstand those pressures. Yepsen proposed professionalizing the voting process by bringing in county government to administer the balloting as they do in state and local elections.

Such a step would surely cost money, he said, but the state may find it a worthwhile investment if it ensures the continuation of the caucuses as a national political spectacle.

Sabato, the election forecaster, agreed. Nothing underscores skepticism about the caucuses like the notion of handwritten, hand-counted ballots.

“They have to tighten their procedures,” Sabato said. “Little pieces of paper aren’t good enough.”

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Ia., called for tighter security and improved reporting of caucus results Friday during an appearance on Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program.

The party has three years to fix the problems and should start working, Grassley said.

Craig Robinson, the editor of TheIowaRepublican.com website and a former state party official, suggested technological tweaks could improve caucus night returns and provide more accurate and timely certified results.

Hiring telemarketing firms to double-check results or even just requiring precinct officials to photograph their final vote tallies could bring more security to the process, he said.

But Robinson has been especially critical of Republican Party of Iowa Chairman Matt Strawn since the certified results were released, castigating him for declining to immediately declare Santorum the winner and calling for his resignation.

“I think Matt Strawn himself has done more damage to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status than any outside force ever could,” Robinson said. “The reason why is because he has cast doubt on the process.”

TheIowaRepublican.com’s biggest funder/advertiser is the American Future Fund, which is run by Iowa GOP operative Nick Ryan, a Santorum consultant who left the campaign to start a pro-Santorum super PAC called Red White & Blue.

In a statement provided to the Register on Friday, Strawn acknowledged there was “room for improvement” in the party’s caucus organization.

“We will be soliciting feedback and input from voters, volunteers and Republican stakeholders in the coming weeks and months on ways to ensure Iowans and the nation have confidence in the caucus results and processes,” Strawn said in the statement.